The Democrats of Massachusetts love to impose higher taxes – on anybody but themselves.
Paying more themselves, no way Jose. Forget about it!
People often don’t remember that in Massachusetts, taxpayers have an option on their state tax returns to pay at a rate higher than the normal 5 percent rate.
You can voluntarily pay at a higher rate of 5.85 percent.
It’s for the children, as you may have heard.
And the crumbling infrastructure.
Taxes are the price we pay for civilized society. That’s the quote Democrats always use, from US Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes a century ago.
But the reality is, Massachusetts Democrats believe that taxes are the price somebody else pays for civilized society. Certainly not them. They have better things to do with the money they’ve inherited from their trust funds.
How do I know this?
I have the statistics, from the Mass. Department of Revenue.
So far, for the most recent tax-filing year, 2025, 3,214,231 taxpayers filed Massachusetts income tax returns.
Of those people, exactly 1570 opted to pay at the voluntary higher rate.
That works out to 0.048348 percent. Put another way, when given the choice of giving more, to make society more equitable, fewer than one-twentieth of one percent of Massachusetts residents opted to do the right thing.
But oddly, doing the right thing was exactly what Democrats righteously voted in 2022 to make the “millionaires” do – pay higher taxes.
That year, after five unsuccessful attempts, the hackerama finally pushed through a graduated income tax. It was a narrow victory, even in a year when the state Republican party was mired in scandal and gross incompetence.
With millions upon millions being spent by the Mass Teachers Association and other nose-ring unions, the Democrats could only manage 51 percent — 1,267,132 votes.
Look at this way: in that referendum, almost 1.3 million Massachusetts residents voted to raise income taxes… on somebody else.
But now only 1570 want to pay higher taxes themselves.
There’s an old saying to describe this phenomenon:
“Don’t tax you, don’t tax me. Tax that fellow behind the tree.”
The extra dough the 1570 chumps, er concerned citizens contributed has so far amounted to $807,768, less than a proverbial drop in the bucket of a $63 billion state budget.
I tried to do the math on what the income of those 1570 people averaged, and the number I came up with, with the help of Chat GPT, was around $60,000.
Sixty grand a year is not a lot of money anymore, not after the inflation catastrophe of the Biden junta.
It’s funny, isn’t it, how eager all these virtue-signaling Democrats are to attend, say, a No Kings rally every weekend in their walkers. Or how much they love to put yard signs in their front yards, endorsing such courageous positions as “Water Is Life.”
But when it comes to parting with a few of their bucks, they wouldn’t pay a nickel to see an earthquake.
You know those thousands of illegal aliens flopping here in Massachusetts on the $4 billion in Maura Healey’s welfare, the Democrats would give them the shirt off your back.
The shirt off YOUR back, not theirs.
It used to be said that gangsters would tell their victims, What’s ours is ours and what’s yours is ours.
The Democrats in Massachusetts operate the same way. What’s yours is theirs. Why do you think that Attorney General Andrea Campbell made that drafting “error” that killed the referendum to cut the state income tax from 5 to 4 percent?
The Democrats had to do something because the income tax cut was going to win in a landslide. So it could not stand!
They pulled the same stunt with the questions designed to bring back rent control, or rein in the legislative payola called per diems. Mistakes were made – wink wink nudge nudge.
What the Democrats don’t like, they kill. Sometimes after the referendum question passes, but they prefer to kill them before they make the ballot – less embarrassment that way.
Either way, regime-controlled media says nothing. Not if they know what’s good for them.
It’s enough to make even the few Boston Globe readers and Ch. 5 viewers who remain above ground queasy about how this one-party state thing is working out.
And that may be why as miniscule as the number of taxpayers willing to pay at the higher rate is, it’s actually been falling year to year. Even the comrades have become cynical about the torrent of corruption around here.
In 2024, of the total 3,477,982 filers, 1947 opted to pay at the higher rate.
Basically, a rounding error, but still, the 2024 number amounted to 0.056 percent, compared to 0.048 percent this year.
By my (admittedly fuzzy) math, in 2024, the average chump, er, concerned citizen who checked the box was reporting almost $56,000 in income.
I can still remember when this option to pay higher taxes was passed by the legislature. No one said so directly at the time, but it was designed to show just how hypocritical these limousine liberals in Massachusetts are.
Do as they say, not as they do.
Come to think of it, this check-the-box reform on the state income tax form is one of the very few reforms the hacks have ever pushed through that has worked out exactly the way it as anticipated.